Falling Apart

I have been losing my mind for months. Actually, no—I have been losing my mind for years. If I had to make an honest assessment of my life, my mind has been cracking. In fact, it has cracked several times over the course of my life. Negligible enough for no one to notice, present enough for me to have felt but not known exactly what was happening. There are a few times in my life that I think I came close to breaking. My mind, that is. These were just deeper cracks. Except, of course, the 2019/2020 era. Yeah, that season was a season of madness for a lot of people, so while I do not invalidate my experience, 2019/2020 was a difficult time for most people with very little of a way out.

This time, though, my brain actually broke. And people close to me got to see my mind and my guts—the dura mater, gray and pink matter—spill all over the floor. My face hollowed out like a femur sucked of its marrow. I became, almost instantaneously, a shell of myself. And while the shelling happened quite suddenly, it did not come out of nowhere. This is why I say: I had been losing my mind for years.

For the longest time, my default state of being has been, "I am tired." People close to me have heard this so often I don't get invited to things. And it's not like there are many people close to me anyway, because of living in involuntary isolation and consistent transitions for at least a decade.

You see, the thing about a breaking—or a broken—brain is that something has to tip it over the edge. And if the mind has been under strain, at some point, like everything in life, the impact of some kind of force WILL shatter it. This is exactly what happened to me. My partner and I had a heated argument, and then the days following that argument were just a series of tense moments where we both could not really see each other.

Now, prior to our fight, I had been managing (as best as I could) depressive episodes. Also, I was a few days to my period and through the observation of a former partner, I learned that right before my period, my depressive episodes got quite bad. While I understand there are some hormonal reasons for this, it does not help when you have been told that you may be dealing with mental adaptations that were caused by the traumas of your childhood and your life in general.

When you have existed in a consistent state of needing to prove yourself, being different, blacksheepedness, stress, uncertainty, exhaustion, performance, fear of failure, social obligations and expectations… when your worth has been tied to who you become because who you are has barely been seen or validated—even as you unlearn some of these habits, you get tired.

Granted, I do not think my worth is tied to what I achieve, though it gets tricky sometimes because somehow my ass needs to be able to feed itself. But fundamentally, I will say I love myself. I am still learning to trust myself. It is hard and I falter… often. And I doubt myself… often. And I still try… often. And I want to give up… but my will to push and keep going has always been stronger. Until the last few months. Where I have wondered what the point of it all was. And not in a fleeting existential way, but more of a "I just want to be done" way.

And so when my human and I got into it, it became the thread that completely fractured the exhausted horse's back, legs, neck, and jawbone. I fell apart completely. And in front of this human I respect and love so much? SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT! I was so ashamed. How the hell was I disrupting someone's life in this chaotic and uncomposed way? Me—a whole me that was often the one who was so grounded that it was other people's chaos that came to me, not the other way round? What will this person think of me? I did tell them that people tend to be attracted to the idea of me. And is seeing me this way going to change how they see me? Has their eye cleared? Granted, we both have our faults in relation to the fight, but how do I show my face to my human's friends? They don't know what happened, but somehow it feels like people would be able to see through me. This composed, seemingly grounded, successful PhD candidate at a fucking Ivy League university. This kind of crass behavior—losing control—is not supposed to sit in the same sentence as "someone of my calibre," arbi? I am supposed to be an "awuraba." Someone to look up to. A non-traditional ancestor in the making. How could I fail? Give the conformists a reason to say, "Eheh, see why you should not do things the way Ami has. Or make choices Ami did?" How could me—a whole me—fall apart this way? Reflecting the emptiness I saw in my grandmother's face less than a week before she passed.

But yes. I had been breaking for years. I had managed to bandage, superglue, and solder. Stitch together, sand my surfaces, and attach them. But perhaps I needed to fall apart completely to recreate… to rebuild… to reach back to what is deep within and recreate around that, something new. Not a different version of who I have been iterating into. All of that had to go to ashes and dust. I had to become raw for whatever is next (which, btw, I do not know) to come.

Imagine slowly stepping over a black hole. You feel it is hollow, but you do not drop suddenly. Instead you feel yourself sink… slowly into the hole. You cannot come out, but you do not drop either, and so you figure you can manage the pace. And when you least expect it… the ground gives beneath you and there is a sudden drop into a nowhereness. There is no time to comprehend what is happening because you're disoriented and anxious and paranoid, and there is nothing to grasp onto. You cannot see outside. Everything is dark. That is what falling apart feels like.

Over the last couple of months, I have had so many instances of feeling misunderstood in close relationships with people that I thought knew me and knew the intentions with which I moved through the world. People that I would give—and had given—so much to and for. People who said they would see me… they said they saw me, and when it came to it, and I really needed to be seen, could not. People who, due to personal sentiments, chose violence and harm or entitlement as their way of "reminding me of my place." People who retrospectively remind me that familiarity is not synonymous with kinship.

In this very season also, I have carried the physical and cognitive burdens of being a balancing act, doing the damn pirouette with a fucking smile almost permanently plastered on my face. Makes for a stellar performance, right? And oh, it has cost me!! With multiple intra- and international transitions—research, family, health, deaths, debt, friendships, etc. I have been a one-woman show—not by choice but by circumstance—with life spread out across continents, consciousnesses, cultures, trying to show up. Tired. Feeling like I am failing. But still trying. Because I do not want to be irrelevant. So I try to show up. Often I cannot. Because I am tired. And everything hurts. And I am sensory sensitive all the time. And I have to manage the meager stipend my university gives me. And I am pocket‑sized in stature. And no one really knows me. And so I try and try and try and try. And my trying tired out. So I broke.

When I broke, my partner—scared and worried, falling apart invisibly—helped me gather the pieces. They encouraged me to take a leap of faith and give the world—the very world that terrifies me to my clit—the chance to hold me… or fail me. I listened, and I stuck a finger out of the endless dark pit I was in. I reached out to my friends. In tatters and in shreds. And so far, their support has been the strings that have held me up enough for me to feel my feet as I try to remember what the ground feels like under me and what movement feels like in my body.

I reached out to my therapist too. I asked her, "Do you think I have Borderline Personality Disorder?" This was after three very invalidating neuropsych evaluations. And as the primary person who has been in and out of the holes with me, my therapist sent me this…

Who's That Girl?

Who's that girl?
I know you want to know.
I know you want a name for it. A diagnosis. A neat little hashtag. A label that can explain the weight you've been carrying and the way you've learned to move through this journey called life.
I know you've searched.
Turned pages. Read symptoms. Compared stories. Wondered if somewhere in the language of the experts there was a word waiting to finally explain you.
But the answers are not always in the DSM-5.
Because those pages never say Black Girl Magic.
They never say Black Girl Trauma.
They don't tell the story of a woman whose instincts were sharpened by survival. A woman who adapted and evolved so she could create safety in places that were never safe for her.
They don't always account for the brilliance of becoming what you needed when nobody else could be.
The part of you struggling to navigate relationships?
Maybe she never had safe ones to model.
Maybe trust feels foreign. Maybe vulnerability feels dangerous. Maybe love feels confusing because you've spent so much of your life learning how to protect yourself from its absence.
And the part of you that's screaming?
The one they call "too much." Too loud. Too emotional. Too sensitive.
She is not bad.
She is not broken.
She is not attention-seeking.
She is yelling to be heard.
To be seen.
To be validated.
To be held.
To finally know what it feels like to exist without having to earn belonging.
So no.
You cannot sit neatly inside pathological language.
You are not a collection of symptoms.
You are not a disorder looking for a definition.
You are a sister.
A daughter.
A lover.
A friend.
A woman carrying stories that began long before you and dreams that stretch far beyond you.
You are complicated.
You are peculiar.
You are amazing.
You are human.
And maybe the truest thing about you is not what they call you—
but that beneath every adaptation, every survival strategy, every scar and every strength,
there is simply a soul
asking,
hoping,
praying
to be imperfectly loved
exactly as she is.

… and it made me cry. Because a big part of my fight was feeling broken and not knowing why.